...Are the former Allied nations willing to acknowledge German suffering and loss during World War II? Are they willing to question the morality of the means by which they won the war, even the firebombing that laid waste to 131 German cities and towns, and killed more than half a million people (most of them women, children and the elderly)? Or was the extremity of Nazi aggression so great, the urgency to defeat Hitler so compelling, that the Allies have effectively been shielded from the kind of moral scrutiny that has been focused on the use of atomic weapons against Japan? However one might answer those questions today, for much of the postwar period the occupying nations on both sides of the Berlin wall felt little reason to justify their actions. Germans grumbled mightily among themselves, but any public airing of their grievances was subject to severe constraints and cold war manipulation. And when the German children born during or shortly after the war came of age in the heady years of the late 1960s, they demanded that Germany view the war through the lens of non-German victims, not that of its own losses. German victimhood became politically incorrect....
The real question is whether the victors of World War II will be willing to examine the historical simplifications that have long provided a consensus about the "good war." If the recent resurgence of war memories in the new Berlin Republic has anything to tell us, surely a crucial element is the importance of individual historical experience that resists the either/or logic of victimhood. In a sense, arguing over whose victims can be counted is another way of continuing the war--a war that may truly be over only when we stop feeling the need to deny the Germans their stories of suffering and loss....http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051017/anderson

Rephrase the question in red: Were the crimes against the Germans so great, that the Allies were compelled to make up and inflate German atrocities in order to be shielded from moral scrutinity?!

A very long article, but worth the read. while the writer Sebald stresses the importance of Germans recognizing the unnecessary slaughter of German civilians by the allies. Sebald also attempts to equalize the suffering of German citizens with victims of the holocaust without even questioning the validity of the holocaust story itself.